In Part I, we looked at some of the issues associated with locking and unusable indexes when Moving both tables and table partitions.

The Oracle 12c Database has introduced a number of great new capabilities associated with online DDL activities. One of these really useful features is the capability to now move table partitions online while maintaining associated indexes.

The insert operation is now not locked out by the Move Partition operation and can proceed. The Move Partition operation in turn requires a brief lock at the end of the process (in much the same way as a normal online index rebuild) and so will hang if there are any outstanding transactions on the partition being moved at that time. And again like an online index rebuild, this will not in turn lock out other DML transactions.